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Weekly UpdatesONE EVENING, A COUPLE OF SUMMERS ago, The Times of India organized a free classical music concert at an amphitheater cut into a hill along Bombay's coast. It was a stunning locale, with the sea in the distance and twinkling stars overhead. All around the stage, giant canvasses depicted idyllic scenes of a futuristic Bombay--a city whose contemporary counterpart is an urban nightmare so disturbing, it is the object of intense study by planners and social scientists from around the world. More than 55 percent of the city's 13 million residents live in slums, while poorly built drainage systems leave even newly constructed office districts flooded after heavy rains. But in The Tzmes of India's utopian vision, Bombay was bathed in the colors of sunset, as birds swooped amid glass-and-steel buildings. To the immediate right of the musicians, for instance, was an enormous image of the completed Bandra Worli Sea Link, a bridge that is being built across an inlet of the Arabian Sea. When it is ready--though no one is sure when exactly that will be--city administrators hope the Sea Link will speed the crawl from the suburbs to the southern office districts. Rush-hour traffic in Bombay now moves at less than twelve kilometers an hour.
Before the musicians could really get going, the marketing manager of The Times--which claims to be the best-selling, English-language broadsheet in the world--came out to rally the audience. "Do you believe we have the potential to become a world-class city?" she shouted. The crowd of middle-class Bombay residents bellowed its assent, unmindful of the fact that when the Bandra Worli Sea Link is complete, it will conduct thousands of honking, roaring cars and trucks within 150 meters of the venue in which they were sitting, making music performances (and even lingering conversations) impossible. More alarming, environmentalists believe that the Sea Link was directly responsible for many of the 452 deaths that resulted from a freak cloudburst in 2005: the construction of the bridge narrowed the mouth of a vital drainage channel that flows into the bay, making it incapable of handling the heavy rain and causing a flood upstream that inundated several neighborhoods along the banks of the channel.
The audience's enthusiastic approval of the dubious suggestion that Bombay (which I prefer to the official, Mumbai) stands on the brink of greatness was just another indication of the cocoon of willful ignorance in which India's middle and upper classes have chosen to seclude themselves when it comes to their country's economic situation. This sliver of India's population--estimated at 200 million people--has disproportionately enjoyed the benefits of the country's 9 percent surge of economic growth in recent years, and is now among the most courted groups of consumers on the planet. It has grabbed the attention of producers of so-called FMCGS--Or "fast-moving consumer goods"--from around the world. Even luxury brands such as Gucci and Louis Vuitton have set up shop in India, encouraged by the fact that the country is home to the world's fourth-largest number of billionaires. All the cheerleading about India's future, though, ignores the reality that a full 77 percent of the country's population of just over 1.1 billion is struggling on less than fifty cents a day. While a tiny percentage of the population, mainly in the cities, enjoys a level of affluence unimaginable a generation ago, rural India--home to more than 70 percent of the country's population--is wracked by a man-made agricultural crisis that has driven nearly 150,000 farmers to commit suicide between 1997 and 2005, the latest year for which figures are available. But such stories find relatively little space in most of India's English-language newspapers and on television news shows, which are the primary sources of news and information for the country's urban elite. (Hindi is the national language, but most businessmen, senior bureaucrats, the higher courts, and the best universities use English. While Hindi- and regional-language newspapers often cover stories about the countryside more intensely, their increasingly local focus, facilitated by new technology that allows narrowly zoned editions, means that these issues are rarely seen from a national perspective.)
The journalist Palagummi Sainath says this growing economic gulf between India's elite and the vast majority of its population has created a similar disconnect "between mass media and mass reality." Sainath, now the rural affairs editor of The Hindu, one of the few remaining English-language broadsheets devoted to serious journalism, is the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India's Poorest Districts, perhaps the most admired collection of reportage to have been published in India in the last two decades. His series of meticulously reported articles about the lives of India's most underprivileged was written between May 1993 and June 1995 (the articles were collected in a book in 1996), soon after the country began to restructure its economy in accordance with the prescriptions of free-market advocates. But even that early in the so-called "liberalization" process, it was clear that the withdrawal of agricultural subsidies and ill-considered budget cuts were causing great distress in a country that is still overwhelmingly rural. Re-reading Everybody Loves a Good Drought today is a startling reminder of how much English-language journalism has changed in India--and how quickly. Today, it's difficult to imagine most broadsheets investing so much money or devoting quite so much space to stories that don't directly relate to their "TG," or target group, an ungainly piece of marketing jargon that is commonly used in many newsrooms as a synonym for "reader."
Though the crisis in the countryside has only grown since Sainath wrote Drought, forcing millions of farmers to abandon their plots and seek employment in cities, many of India's English-language newspapers are transforming themselves into halls of mirrors, focusing only on news that they believe will interest their elite readers. This metamorphosis is the product both of a perfervid neo-liberal climate in which everything, including the news, has become a commodity that's up for sale, and of a generational shift in newspaper ownership. As in many parts of the world, India's newspapers are family-owned and run. In the four decades after independence in 1947, many of the proprietors were content to let journalists make the decisions about editorial content. This relatively hands-off approach was a legacy of the freedom struggle, which nationalist newspapers had shaped and help to sustain. But since the 1990s, a new generation of newspaper owners has adopted a number-crunching approach to journalism. Many of them view the news merely as the stuff between the ads. In some cases, they've even attempted to ensure that the editorial content is designed to create an environment that's conducive to attracting advertising. Taking this attitude to the extreme, The Times of India has set up a unit called Medianet that actually sells editorial space to advertisers. With uncharacteristic coyness, the unit's Web site says that it provides "comprehensive media coverage and content solutions to clients."
So while the readers of English-language newspapers are served supplements with titles like "Splurge," in which they can learn all about holidays in Monaco and the latest yachts, they are denied the information they need to understand how projects like the Bandra Worli Sea Link or the upheaval on the country's farms are affecting their lives.
The Times of India, which claims a readership of approximately 1.7 million in Bombay and 6.8 million countrywide, has advocated the concept of "aspirational journalism." The paper, for which I once worked, is now run by Samir Jain and his brother, Vineet. They have often told their journalists that the Times must help readers forget the mundane reality of their lives and show them the possibilities of what their new affluence can bring. Famously, Samir Jain once ordered his journalists in Bombay to stop reporting on the garbage that frequently is left uncollected in the city's streets because of inefficient city administrators. "Our readers have difficult lives," he told me at the only meeting I ever had with him. "We should put a smile to their faces every morning instead of reminding them of their problems."
Jain's enormously profitable publication has set an example that many other newspapers have followed. Many of India's English-language newspapers have abandoned the responsibility of being the fourth pillar of democracy (a role that many of them had first begun to embrace during the struggle for independence against the British). Now, they claim that they are mere content providers devoted to delivering to advertisers the largest number of eyeballs possible. I As a result, the increasing divide between rich and poor that is a consequence of new economic policies introduced in the early 1990s--which include a predilection for privatizing even profitable public enterprises and slashing subsidies in several sectors, including health and education--is not really part of the public discourse. India ranks 128th on the United Nation's human-development index-which measures life expectancy, educational standards, and standard of living--below such economic tigers as the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, and Guatemala. The themes around which Everybody Loves a Good Drought is organized--debt, health, education, displacement, irrigation--remain the biggest problems India must tackle if it is to improve the lives of all its citizens. Yet despite the obvious problems, large sections of the country's English-language press operate as though they are allies of the state in a national project to convince citizens that India is predestined to soar to global supremacy. That sentiment was highlighted in a recent Times of India advertising campaign that had as its punch line the phrase, "India Poised" suggesting that the nation stood on the precipice of imminent greatness. (Ironically, it was the Times that first published Sainath's searing reportage that eventually became Drought. In fact, the newspaper gave him a fellowship to fund his research, when the father of the present owners was chairman of the company.)
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